Tolstoy

From Dmitry’s deathbed, Tolstoy had travelled to Moscow, and it was here that he learned of his brother’s death when the former prostitute Masha arrived back in the city. She told Tolstoy that Dmitry had only realised the hopelessness of his situation hours before he passed away, when he had started asking for a priest and a doctor, and pleading to be taken to Yasnaya Polyana so he could die quietly there. It was at Yasnaya Polyana that he was buried. Tolstoy later repented bitterly of being so wrapped up in his own life that he had not noticed the seriousness of his brother’s condition earlier. He also felt remorse for the caddish way he had behaved towards him. In Anna Karenina he would bring Dmitry back to life again as Levin’s brother Nikolay, a character who also has a relationship with a former prostitute. Having missed the real event, Tolstoy took particular care when it came to describing Nikolay’s agonising demise in the only chapter in the novel to bear a title (‘Death’), by which time he could also draw on the experience of witnessing his brother Nikolay die. Tolstoy also went out of his way at the end of his life to write at length about the real-life Dmitry in his memoirs.

Tolstoy stayed on in Moscow for about a month before returning to St Petersburg, which gave him the opportunity to meet those writers who were based in the old capital, such as Sergey and Konstantin Aksakov. As prominent Slavophiles opposed to to Russia’s Westernisation, the Aksakovs would have never dreamed of living in the European-looking St Petersburg. The controversy amongst the Russian intelligentsia between the two warring camps of the Slavophiles and Westernisers had first flared up in the previous decade, and the impassioned public debates about Russia’s present and future would continue for the rest of Tolstoy’s life. He probably already knew he was not a Westerniser, but he would typically also come to reject Slavophile ideology in time, even though his preoccupation with traditional forms of native rural life would seem to make him a natural ally. When it came down to it, Tolstoy’s egotism would simply not allow him to become part of a movement in which he and his ideas did not take centre stage. He returned to Petersburg at the end of January 1856. This time he wisely lived on his own, and stayed in the capital until the middle of May. The last of his war stories was published in The Contemporary in the January issue, but this time with a difference: ‘Sebastopol in August’ was the first of his works to be signed ‘Count L. Tolstoy’.¹³

That spring he worked hard on two further stories, which were both published in The Contemporary. The first was ‘The Snowstorm’, which appeared in March, an artistically ambitious and visionary work inspired by the atrocious weather he had encountered during his journey home from the Caucasus in January 1854. ‘The Two Hussars’ was a gambling tale with a moral which compared two generations of the Russian nobility. It was dedicated to Tolstoy’s sister Masha and appeared in May. As far as the editors of The Contemporary were concerned, Tolstoy was still their star writer, and at some point that spring he signed a contract with the journal. Along with Turgenev, Ostrovsky and Grigorovich, the journal’s three other most valued writers, Tolstoy promised first refusal on new works for the next four years, in return for a share of its profits.¹⁴

Tolstoy came to regret signing that contract. His headstrong and eccentric views had been met with raised eyebrows and pursed lips during his first meetings with the Petersburg literary fraternity, but after he came back from Moscow in January there were remonstrations and then arguments, some of which became very heated, particularly with Turgenev. Tolstoy took offence easily, but he also gave offence easily. He was younger than his new friends, and sometimes seemed to be contrary just for the sake of it – he liked being outrageous. And then were arguments on subjects he had strong and dogmatic views about, such as the ‘woman question’. The first major conflict arose in early February over the prolific French novelist George Sand, whom Turgenev greatly admired for her bravery and independent spirit. Tolstoy believed in the institution of marriage, and was not an adherent of women’s emancipation (the ‘girls’ he visited in Petersburg’s brothels were another matter, of course). It was a particularly charged argument, because of the menage à trois arrangement maintained by Nekrasov and his co-editor Panayev, whose wife Advotya was Nekrasov’s mistress, as Tolstoy well knew. Another altercation with one of Nekrasov’s colleagues on 19 March even led Tolstoy to challenge him to a duel. The challenge went unanswered, and for a while Tolstoy considered giving up literature and moving back to the country.¹⁵